QDW #1

      Through my own personal experiences, I cannot argue that technology has played a significant role in my life. I also believe that there are both benefits and drawbacks to being in a technologically advanced world. To be completely honest, I would like to say that I wish that there wasn't such thing as social media; however, I know that social media can be a great source of sharing and receiving information. The problem with this generation is that we have become too dependent on social media to keep us informed, not particularly with political or educational matters, but on topics revolving around other people and the things they are doing in his or her free time. Sites such as Twitter and Facebook, that were founded on the principals of trying to create an outlet for information flow, have become places that people resort to for meeting people and sharing content.
      While these types of websites offer the users a free streaming of resources based on people you follow, they also give people useful information based on your interests or what you search. In my opinion, I think that technology can be useful for people to  benefit from. Personally, I am guilty of spending a lot of my free time on social media because it is an easy way to waste time. Another reason I use social media and search the web is when I want to distract myself; however, I find that I tend to do this more as I procrastinate getting work done. This can be a problem because it means that it causes more problems later on when I have to rush to get everything done.
      Technology as a whole has benefitted our society in terms of advancing our knowledge of space and time, and the ability to create tools that can make things more convenient for users to use. In viewing the documentary with Dr. Baurlein, I have developed a few opinions on some of the statements he mentioned through his perspective. Below are my remarks on these topics:

Quote 1: "They have developed a brazen disregard for books and reading."
Through my personal experiences, I found that while some facts may be accurate of certain people or groups, a lot of the information provided could be technically hypocritical of a lot of teenagers. For instance, this quote specifically holds bias towards people like me. I can argue that this fact alone is untrue and hypocritical, because I am among the database of people he analyzes, and in my free time, I spend more time reading books than surfing the web. Obviously I alone am not that influential when you look at the broader scale of teenagers in America, however, I do believe that not all young people fall into this category.

Quote 2: "Lack of capitalization and IM codes dominate online writing. Without spellcheck, folks are toast." & "They get ridiculed for original thought, good writing." 
I can see why this aspect of social media could be an argument for older generations to make, specifically on websites such as Facebook that are more diverse in age groups can notice these trends. This quote holds some truth, as a lot of kids online do tend to lack proper sentence structure when making statuses and when sharing information. I think that often times, kids online are trying to share their content quickly, and that is why they overlook correctness in sentence structure, but also another quote of his was that kids get ridiculed for being grammatically correct, which I also can agree with. If I were to share a post on Facebook with a couple paragraphs of content consisting of perfect grammatical flow, I know that I would get sarcastic comments about what I posted from friends. 

Quote 3: "They make excellent jaywalking targets."
In his argument, he suggests that kids are a lot more taken away from reality when they are surfing the web or streaming through social media. I definitely can agree with this statement, because a lot of my friends will be physically with me when I am trying to have a conversation with them, but they won't mentally be present. For instance, if I were to try to tell something to a friend while he or she is on twitter, I guarantee only half of what I am saying will go through to them. This may also be true of his statement about jaywalking, because often times, kids will have their heads down, looking a their phones, when they are walking alone because they don't have company to distract their thoughts and keep them entertained.